IT Teams Thriving With DevOps

As part of the agile movement, the term "DevOps" emerged in 2009 as a quick, techno-hip way to combine the words "development" and "operations." Since then, the concept has gained momentum, to the point where a majority of organizations are either implementing DevOps or are planning to, according to a recent survey from Puppet Labs. The resulting "2014 State of DevOps Report" reveals that these companies foster a more open, trusting and interactive environment in general, and they deploy code far more successfully than they would without DevOps. "The best global organizations employ IT practices that enable agility and reliability, by breaking down silos and actively encouraging collaboration across boundaries," says Gene Kim, one of the report's contributors and author of The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win (IT Revolution Press). "They sustain a level of IT performance that hardly seems possible to the rest of the world. DevOps helps businesses win, enabling them to exceed profitability, market share and productivity goals." The report includes a comprehensive list of best practices, and we've included a handful of them here. An estimated 9,200 global IT and software development professionals participated in the research. For a copy of the report (registration required), click here.

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On Board

57% of survey participants say they are implementing or have already implemented DevOps practices.

Cause and Effect

Organizations with a designated DevOps department are 50% more likely to have a high-performing IT department.

Convincing Numbers

High-performing IT organizations deploy code 30 times more frequently than their counterparts, with 50% fewer failures.

Best DevOps Practices: Incorporate Continuous Delivery

Make sure the software is always in a releasable state, so deployment is a non-event which can be accomplished on demand.

Best DevOps Practices: Use Version Control for All Production Artifacts

This makes it easier for testing and troubleshooting, with changes made during production repeatedly in a reliable, low-risk way.

Best DevOps Practices: Keep Review In-House

IT performance decreases when external approval, such as change-approval boards, are involved. But performance increases when a tech team holds itself accountable for the code quality through peer review.